As can be seen from this VLT image at less than 1 arcseconds resolution, the small companion galaxy NGC 1097A looks very strange.
If there is no immediate recognition of which morphological class (Hubble type) a galaxy belongs to, one way to decide where it is in the orthodox Hubble Sequence is to ask: "Is this an elliptical galaxy?", "Is this an S0 galaxy?", etc.
But it is really hard to decide what type of galaxy this is, in the absence of information about its three-dimensional shape and about how the stars within it move.....
A Nucleated Dwarf Elliptical galaxy? An S0 galaxy?
Hmmmmm........
It is really hard to tell what type of galaxy this is, as the concept of a spheroid fits the observed structure moderately well, but the concept of a disk also fits the observed structure moderately well.
These Hubble "types" are conceptual templates (morphological classes) that do
not apply to all known galaxies, though they are widely applicable in the local galaxy populations at the current time in the evolution of the universe.
You can find quite a lot of galaxies that look like this in very distant Galaxy Cluster environments;
yet this is not a familiar look, to us, because the nearby galaxy population contains very few galaxies that look like this.
Any punters as to what is going on in this galaxy?